The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure by James Redfield Page A

said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
    For a moment we looked out at the open fields and at the cascading tropical plants in the terraced beds on each side of us, then I asked: “Do you happen to know where the research gardens are?”
    “Sure,” she said. “I’m heading that way now. I’ll show you.”
    After introducing ourselves, we walked down the steps and onto the well-worn path heading south. Her name was Sarah Lorner and she was sandy-haired and blue-eyed and could have been described as girlish except for her serious demeanor. We walked for several minutes in silence.
    “Is this your first visit here?” she asked.
    “Yes, it is,” I replied.” I don’t know much about the place.”
    “Well, I’ve been here on and off for almost a year now so I can fill you in a bit. About twenty years ago this estate became popular as a sort of international scientific hangout. Various scientific organizations had their meetings here, biologists and physicists mainly. Then a few years ago…”
    She hesitated for an instant and looked at me. “Have you heard of the Manuscript that was discovered here in Peru?”
    “Yes, I have,” I said. “I’ve heard about the first two insights.” I wanted to tell her how fascinated I was with the document but I held back, wondering whether to trust her completely.
    “I thought maybe that was the case,” she said. “It looked as if you were picking up on the energy here.”
    We were crossing a wooden bridge which traversed the creek. “What energy?” I asked.
    She stopped and leaned back against the railing of the bridge. “Do you know anything about the Third Insight?”
    “Nothing.”
    “It describes a new understanding of the physical world. It says we humans will learn to perceive what was formerly an invisible type of energy. The lodge has become a gathering place for those scientists interested in studying and talking about this phenomenon.”
    “Then scientists think this energy is real?” I asked.
    She was turning to walk across the bridge. “Only a few,” she said, “and we take some heat for it.”
    “You’re a scientist, then?”
    “I teach physics at a small college in Maine.”
    “So why are some scientists disagreeing with you?”
    She was silent for a moment, as if in thought. “You have to understand the history of science,” she said, glancing at me as if to ask whether I wanted to get deeper into the subject. I nodded for her to proceed.
    “Think about the Second Insight for a moment. After the fall of the medieval world view, we in the west suddenly became aware that we lived in a totally unknown universe. In attempting to understand the nature of this universe we knew we had to somehow separate fact from superstition. In this regard we scientists assumed a particular attitude known as scientific skepticism, which in effect demands solid evidence for any new assertion about how the world works. Before we would believe anything, we wanted evidence that could be seen and grabbed with the hands. Any idea that couldn’t be proved in some physical way was systematically rejected.”
    “God knows,” she continued, “this attitude served us well with the more obvious phenomena in nature, with objects such as rocks and bodies and trees, objects everyone can perceive no matter how skeptical they are. We quickly went out and named every part of the physical world, attempting to discover why the universe operated as it did. We finally concluded that everything that occurs in nature does so according to some natural law, that each event has a direct physical and understandable cause.” She smiled at me knowingly. “You see, in many ways scientists have not been that different from others in our time period. We decided along with everyone else to master this place in which we found ourselves. The idea was to create an understanding of the universe that made the world seem safe and manageable, and the skeptical attitude kept us